Welcome to the roller coaster that is life. If you’re just joining us, sorry for the crap show. It was like this even before I got here. And the people in charge are just making it worse and worse.
There have been some developments in both my public and personal worlds, interestingly represented by eyes and ears. While the saying is in that order, I want to start with the ears, because it will be short-ish.
THE EARS
A couple of months ago, Findaway made an announcement that I saw but didn’t fully register until it was reiterated by a podcast I listen to, Joanna Penn’s The Creative Penn podcast. Since I’m almost two months behind on my podcasts, it wasn’t until this week that I got the news.
Back in April 2023, I created an AI-narrated audiobook for Seeing Red, a book that was not even close to worth the expense of getting it professionally narrated.
Now, Findaway Voices is accepting the Google Play files for distribution to other platforms. Not Apple, I’m sure, as they have their own AI narration, and likely not Audible, for the same reason. But if I can get it to work, Seeing Red the audiobook will be available on Spotify and anywhere else that will accept auto-narration.
For anyone who is yelling at their screen that I’m part of the problem, that I’m allowing AI narration to take jobs away from professional human narrators, cool your jets. Seeing Red was never going to get an audiobook. It’s an awful book. While Comedy of Terrors isn’t that much better, I like that one enough that I wanted the audiobook. And guess what I did? I hired a narrator to get it done. And if Best Enemies Forever turns out good enough, guess what I’ll be doing for the audio version? I’ll be hiring a professional human narrator again. No jobs were taken from a human in the making of Seeing Red. The only thing AI did was make that audiobook happen at all.
All of that said, however, I’ve already run into a snag. It will be at least next week before I can get the extended distribution set up.
THE EYES
I mentioned in the last post that 2024 will be year I get my eye surgery. Please pardon my shuddering; I am not looking forward to it at all.
I have been to the Ophthalmologist twice in January, once for the initial consultation and exam to confirm cataracts. They are confirmed in spades. She even commented on how thick the film is in my left eye. The second appointment was to take eye measurements and to schedule the actual surgery.
And, of course, there is a roadblock.
I won’t go into excruciating detail on the appointment(s), but I will say that I hate hate hate eye drops. I also did not enjoy the ultrasound she had to perform to get accurate measurements.
However, I will state the roadblock here and what I intend to do — to help me stay accountable. Because I listed on my new patient form some of my health history, including high blood pressure and a family history of heart issues, I am required to be “medically cleared” to have the procedure done. I am not a fan of doctors. And I have some intense personal feelings about certain things involving health. Long story not quite as long, the fact that I have to go in for a full physical at the age of 51 is not appealing to me. The fact that I am going to have to (likely) start medication for my blood pressure is also not happy-inducing. But I need this surgery, so I am going to bite that particular bullet and go to their recommended doctor in the next week or three to get the process started.
More to come, I’m sure, because if I suffer, you must know about it!
WRITING IN PUBLIC
Revision goes (…?…) on Best Enemies Forever. I’ve identified, with the help of the AI Bot I “created” (put in a prompt to tell the existing language model how to behave during our interactions), that there are issues. I even have one solution in the queue. For the very end. Which I can’t implement yet because the rest of the tangled mess hasn’t been unwraveled yet. But I now have a slightly better idea of the questions I need to start asking the bot to get more detailed guidance on what I can do to fix it. Could I go to a professional developmental editor? Yes, I could, and I probably will once I get the first revision done. (I don’t usually use a developmental editor; they tend to be the most expensive kind, and I actually do have a pretty good grasp of story progression, even though you can’t tell it from my existing work.)
Other than that, my time on the computer has been spent lollygagging and doing things that do not involve this hobby I keep saying I want to do and then don’t actually do.
MUSICAL SHARES
I didn’t get a chance to talk about this last month, but The Ocean Saga, the third concept album from the EPIC series by Jorge Rivera-Herrans, released on December 25, 2023. It’s just as… well, epic… as the previous two. We had been waiting for 11 months for this one, and I’m extra happy that it did not let me down.
But this month, I want to talk about someone I just started listening to. His name is Alec Benjamin. I probably wouldn’t have even given him a second thought, but… well, read on.
I’m a Spotify Premium member. No, not flexing, just explaining how this came to be. It’s my one-stop shop for music, podcasts, and now a certain amount of free (included with membership) audiobook listening. Plus, since my audiobooks are distributed primarily through Findaway Voices, owned by them, I also get paid when premium subscribers listen. Not a shameless plug or anything, just saying…
One of Spotify’s features that I love for discovering new music, is the Release Radar playlist. Every Friday, they have a new playlist, tailored to me, which features new releases from the week that I might enjoy, based on artists I follow and my current listening tastes. Since I listen to so much EPIC, for example, as well as some of the different musical soundtracks I’ve loved over the years, they play a lot of new cast recordings for various shows that have popped up lately. Spotify is the reason I know there are musical stage shows of 17 Again and Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
A week or so ago, a song came on by Alec Benjamin. It was a kid singing about therapy and how his own issues affected his therapist. The song is called “I Sent My Therapist to Therapy.” (It was a Friday that I went to the grocery store, because the song was playing as I traversed the store’s parking lot.) The kid sounded like he was about 15, and the only things I thought about the song at the time were, “Oh, that’s funny” and “Poor kid is already in therapy.” Which I could kind of relate to; I was in therapy at age 13 for self-esteem issues.
The Release Radar this past Friday (writing this only a couple days before posting instead of the usually-intended week or two ahead), was a song called “Pick Me.” The two things in this song that caught me was that (again) he sounded like he was about 15 and a line that made me do a double-take. In the song he’s asking the person he’s singing to whether it’s lying if he said he went to USC but didn’t graduate. The line itself isn’t what gave me pause, but the fact that it was sung by someone who sounds like he should still be in high school. So I looked him up.
This “kid” is turning 30 this year. He’s twice as old as I thought he was! Which, now that I was aware of him, and having liked both of the songs I’d heard, decided to check out everything he has on Spotify.
The strangest thing about him is that if I hadn’t been confused/intrigued enough to look him up, I would not be talking about him now. The songs were enjoyable enough, but it’s a music type I don’t always enjoy. He’s a singer/songwriter, and a lot of the time those artists turn me off. It often feels like they’re trying to impress you with their turns of phrase. And to be fair, there’s a degree of that here. What keeps me listening is that there’s an extra something about the music aspect that is not the same kind of off-putting as others, whose names I can’t come up with because I don’t care enough about them to remember them. It’s not even something I can articulate well, which is frustrating. I guess it’s kind of like the art non-snobs. “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.” Well, I know slightly more about music and music theory than that, but the second part is still true. And yeah, I’ll admit that the fact that a near 30-year-old sounds 15 is part of the novelty.
Some of his songs, like “Mind is a Prison” and “If We Have Each Other”, are heartbreaking in their vulnerability. Others, like the two songs that introduced him to me, are just fun. There’s a hope and a cynicism in his delivery of some of his music (“I’m Not a Cynic” is a nicely ironic song in that regard). That’s hard to pull off, but his youthful voice allows him to do that. I don’t know. It’s weird.
And all because I thought a teenager had attended college but dropped out.
GAMING THINGS
We are back in business! We have begun Adventure 3 in our play of Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Skull & Shackles, and last week we started the second scenario, the one we lost before, when Girelle died. I’m excited! I’d be even more excited if we’d actually won the scenario last week. We lost again. But the good news is no one died. In our next session, we’re going to try a new tactic. In a standard game, there is a single villain with lots of lackeys. To win, we have to defeat the villain and leave nowhere for them to escape. It’s a lot of mumbo jumbo involving different piles of cards to represent different locations. I’ll spare you the boring explanation. Unlike most scenarios, this one has three villains, which must all be in the same pile of cards for us to be able to win. So, instead of our usual divide-and-conquer tactic that allows us to put temporary barriers in place to help us win, we’re going to stick together and try to close all the locations as fast as we can so all three villains end up in the same place. The bonus effect is that several of us have healing powers, so we will not have to make someone come to us (or go to them) and waste a turn to keep them alive. Everyone will already be right there. Those of us who have powers that help combat when we are in the same place can do that.
Yeah, I’m actually interested in the game, and I feel my own eyes rolling into the back of my head at this description. Sorry.
But we’re back to where we were before, glitches! This is cause to be happy-adjacent!
WRAPPING UP
Things are happening. Some of them are good things. Others are also good things that do not feel so good right now but will feel awesome when it’s all said and done. 2024 is the year I stop being a (swear word) coward and just do the thing I should have done years ago when it first reared its ugly head within my ugly head.
I hope that your 2024 is having good things, even if they don’t necessarily feel good right now. Remember, everything that happens will make you the person you will ultimately become. And unless that person is a [if you knew what I had put here originally, you would be clamoring for me to be canceled], that’s a good thing.
Take care of yourselves. And take care of the people around you. You never know when you’re the difference it takes in a person’s life.